The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  Deep into what was becoming a blissful summer, Margaret and I decided to skip town. We set off for a Greek island. Because we liked it so much, we stayed. Or rather, we moved to another. And then to another. I’m not sure we ever knew some of their names. One was somewhere near Mykonos, where, with no signs of permanent habitation at all, sculptural young Scandinavians, French and Germans lay stretched out sleek like cheetahs, entirely naked on crescent beaches, their skin the same colour as the sand and the setting sun. It was Arcadia. At each large island, a telegram would be waiting at the post office from the Royal Court management, presumably sent scattergun across the Cyclades, pointing out that I was contractually out of my holiday period and ordering me to return immediately. We laughed as we tore them up. Usually, it is only years later that you become aware that you might once have been young and lithe. For a few weeks in 1971, bronzed against the wind and with nowhere particular to go, Margaret and I were aware at the time. And the awareness made us happy.

  On my return everything which had been easy suddenly became difficult. I did have a reasonable time at the Edinburgh Festival directing Blow Job, a typically provocative play of Snoo’s which then set off on a tour. The joke was that it was actually about safe-cracking. However, when Snoo and I went on television to discuss it, Eamonn Andrews, a popular Irish broadcaster who believed himself to be a family favourite, stopped when he saw the title on his idiot boards and said, ‘I’m not saying that word.’ Lay-By, also presented by Portable, was enjoying a gratifying succès de scandale at the same Festival in Snoo’s louche production, partly because the Traverse cleverly scheduled it at 1.15 a.m. This gave it a special glamour. When the play later had a one-night outing at the Royal Court, with bodies being lowered on winches into vats to make jam, and hardcore pornographic pictures being distributed by actors among the audience, Lindsay Anderson, thunder-faced, whispered theatrically to Christopher Hampton, ‘I suppose this is your fault.’ Here was the heart of the problem. None of the directors at the Court much liked the direction a lot of new writing was taking. They found any kind of confrontational art childish and immature. We thought Britain couldn’t go on as it was. They thought it could. So when I delivered my next play, The Great Exhibition, plotted around a Labour MP who takes to flashing on Clapham Common, it was immediately clear they had no wish to present it.

  It would become a common stumbling block for resident dramatists at the Royal Court that the one thing they couldn’t expect was to get their plays performed. Read, yes. Done, no. The Royal Court was known as a writer’s theatre, but there remained a tension in the fact that it was already run, like most British theatres, by a caste of self-interested directors. Like some of my successors in the post, I found I had no advocate within the building. Originally I had been brought in to read, not to write. We had been in a forced marriage and now it was time to divorce. When I decided to resign – how exactly could I be resident dramatist when they wouldn’t do my play? – the three directors succeeded manfully in hiding their dismay. After all, by walking out I was solving their problem for them. Michael Codron, who had cannily contracted me for two plays, suggested his homeless comic dramatist go back to Hampstead. The board had in controversial circumstances replaced its founder James Roose-Evans with the more irenic Vivian Matalon, who told me that he had heard from everyone that I was impossible. It didn’t matter, he said. He liked impossible. Codron suggested that to direct the play we should get in the silent man from Benares, Richard Eyre. When we had eventually met at the house of our mutual friends, John McGrath and Elizabeth MacLennan, I had warmed to Richard immediately and relished his dry self-deprecation. He, at least, seemed to think the play was funny. The fact that David Warner and Penelope Wilton leapt at the chance to appear in it also encouraged us in this belief. Sara Kestelman always says that her decision to turn down the third of the leading roles was the biggest professional mistake she ever made. She’s being kind.

  Normally it’s when a playwright is sitting in the auditorium that they overhear remarks that pierce them to the heart. At any of my plays, I can guarantee to be placed next to the person who is loudly enjoying things least. But in the case of The Great Exhibition, it was after an early preview as a couple were walking away from the theatre that I saw the woman put her arm round her partner’s waist and say, ‘I’m sorry, darling, that was my idea.’ That remark summed up my experience too. The Great Exhibition did well enough, the audience laughed, and after six weeks it was off. The cast had acquired Carolyn Seymour, the granddaughter of Moura, Baroness Budberg, who, in the late afternoons, ran a literary salon where she would regale you with stories of being the mistress of both Gorky and H. G. Wells. Rehearsals were from time to time disrupted by the blackouts attendant on the latest miners’ strike. Richard did a flawless job, and for any lover of first-rate acting, time spent watching David and Penelope is never wasted. But fictions with central metaphors contain their own dangers. The metaphor tends to hang around, somehow squeezing the life out of the play, taking it nowhere. As in a bad production of The Seagull or Rhinoceros or The Wild Duck, my particular metaphor seemed over-obvious and obscure at the same time. The act of exhibitionism was meant to illuminate my view of recent Labour governments, prone to displaying but not doing. I certainly didn’t know enough about the Labour Party to write well about it, but, in Pauline Kael’s words, ‘Such is the treacherous power of an artist, that sometimes even the worst ideas are made to work.’ In the bar in the interval on the first night I heard a drunken David Mercer loudly declaring, ‘Some of these jokes have very distinguished theatrical ancestry.’

  The mention of Chekhov is appropriate. The Great Exhibition, if I had but realised, dramatised the same dilemma as Chekhov’s young masterpiece, Ivanov. At that point I had never heard of it, though before the turn of the century it would provide me with one of my most fulfilling experiences when I adapted it for Ralph Fiennes to play at the Almeida. A man, in my case a Labour MP, in Chekhov’s a landowner, is disillusioned before his time. At the age of thirty-five, he’s already burnt out and has no idea what to do with the rest of his life. In both plays, he is trying to stop himself becoming a hand-me-down Hamlet. Only one of my friends guessed that I had named my central character Hammett not to evoke Spillane, but to evoke Denmark. Like Slag, The Great Exhibition came without what Orson Welles called ‘the dollar-book Freud’, i.e. that moment when you know the author feels obliged to offer some explanation of the work’s meaning. In the case of Citizen Kane, it was Rosebud. But with these two plays there was none.

  In those days, my facile anger was as often burning against distant things as close. The lordly feelings of betrayal which inspired some of the satire in The Great Exhibition came from a growing conviction that everything that was collective and worthwhile about Britain was being shipped out to sea. When Raymond Williams had warned us, at the election of Wilson’s second administration in 1966, not to believe in Labour governments because they invariably let their supporters down, we students had dismissed him as a despairing old cynic. But now, six years later, watching the hard-won achievements of the immediate post-war period running away into the gutter, and a hapless Edward Heath government struggling to implant a makeshift culture of managerialism, I was faced with a much more difficult question. If social democracy could no longer deliver betterment, and yet revolutionary socialism was a dangerous illusion, then what exactly was it that I did believe in?

  In such circumstances there was inevitably an apocalyptic strain in a lot of fringe theatre to which Tony and I were vigorously contributing. But whatever the contradictions of our politics, our artistic belief in the short life of collaboration was genuine and principled. In our view, the chief vice of the British theatre was its continuing insistence on clinging to institutions which had long outgrown their purpose. Any company which was vital didn’t last long. Nevertheless we were reluctant to throw away an admittedly small Arts Council grant which had taken so much determination to get. So we handed Port
able Theatre to a new artistic director and told him to get on and do whatever he wanted, with the sole condition that it be different from what we had done. Tony and I went back to the Arts Council and asked them to fund a new company which we had decided to call Shoot. The time had come, we said, for something much bigger and much more ambitious: a large-scale touring company dedicated to the production of new and topical plays. The Arts Council, not exactly fine-tuned to the notion of permanent revolution, refused us at first sight, but did say they would return to helping us project by project. The desperation of our politics surely underlay some of our recklessness. Steadier hands would have held course. But we were also moved by a proper and admirable impulse which said that if we didn’t move on, we would get stuck. We had done nearly four years with Portable and that was enough.

  We decided to devote Shoot’s first, and, it turned out, only show to what was happening in Ireland. From 1967 onwards, the Troubles, always rumbling, had flared with renewed vigour, first through a campaign of civil disobedience against injustices suffered by the Catholic minority at the hands of the Unionists in the North, then more directly through paramilitary confrontation on both sides. Reginald Maudling, my fellow Harewood old boy, when appointed home secretary in 1970, had got on the plane to return to London after his first visit to Northern Ireland and said, ‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ The killing of fourteen unarmed civil rights protestors by the British Army on Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, had brought things to a head. Direct rule from Westminster was soon to follow. Yet about these events, the British theatre had kept a cowardly and shameful silence. What more important task could there be for any new theatre company than to tackle this subject of which everyone else appeared to be frightened?

  It was obvious that no single writer could fulfil this commission. So we asked the original Lay-By writers to forge another joint-authored play, though this time not to be written on a wall. Most were up for it. Why not? It was time someone did it. And what was the worst that could happen? We could only fail. The core group was this time strengthened by the addition of Tony himself and of David Edgar, who had been working as a journalist in Bradford, and who brought some reportorial vim to the group. We rented a sodden pebbledash bungalow in south Wales for a week. One of our number arrived, put some beer-laden Sainsbury’s bags down on the kitchen table and loudly started the proceedings by demanding, ‘Now there’s not going to be any nonsense, is there? We are pro-IRA, aren’t we? No messing about?’ Understandably, in a week of hectic dispute, interrupted by muddy, rain-lashed walks across stumpy hillsides, things never really calmed down from there. There were a couple of Marxists among us, but my own state of political turmoil slowly percolated into the finished play. Probably I was representative. Most of us didn’t believe violence was going to deliver justice for the Catholics. We thought, rightly, that once mayhem had started it would gain a criminal momentum which would make it almost impossible to stop. But on the other hand we didn’t believe that things could have remained as they were. If there was any viewpoint uniting the seven of us, it was the feeling that what was going on in Ireland was a deeply English problem. That was the reason we called the play England’s Ireland. Mainland Britain’s claim to be acting as some sort of impartial referee between two warring tribes was risible, and, more importantly, destined to end in tears. How could any British government expect to have its claims to neutrality taken seriously when it had itself been implicated in so many crimes in the territory?

  All of us went over for some barricaded weeks in Belfast, which we found to be in an improvised state of civil siege, half town, half army camp. Some of us stayed longer than others, and some got further into the opposing camps. But none of us pretended to be experts. Nor did the play make us out to be. Indeed, if the evening had certain strengths at that time very unusual for a British play, they came from the refreshing honesty of its viewpoint. But as we started pulling the text together, it became clear that it was going to be difficult to find anywhere to put the play on. We wrote fifty-four letters to theatres up and down the country and got three replies. We were being frozen out. To its credit, the Arts Council were as annoyed as we were. When pressed for a reason, various venues produced the usual excuse that they were not – perish the thought! – fearful for themselves, but they could not responsibly put their audiences in danger with such incendiary material. One particular scene, the strongest in the play, had everyone worried. An IRA man appears and talks to the audience in direct address while holding the bloody limbs of one of his victims in a plastic bag. Well, asked the theatres, with such provocation, how did they know they wouldn’t get bombed?

  Snoo and I decided to co-direct. Since the writing had been shared, why not the direction too? It was an arrangement which worked surprisingly well, although when we started rehearsals with a cast of twelve and a terrifying weekly wage bill of £600, we had almost nowhere in prospect to present the play in the UK at all. Ritsaert ten Cate, the Dutch hero of the British fringe, had invited us to play a few introductory weeks in his new Mickery Theatre. It was typical of his courage, but his wooden playhouse, set among misty, silent canals in the Utrecht village of Loenersloot, twenty minutes outside Amsterdam, was hardly at the epicentre of the Irish problem. Up till the last day the text was still being rewritten. Some of our seven writers saw it through, some didn’t, but Tony and his brother Nick were always there, taking advantage of the presence of exceptional singers like Tim Curry and Dennis Lawson to contribute songs which were often inspired by the tattered book of ballads they had found in a Belfast second-hand bookshop. The cast was equally divided between Irish and English actors. The cultural differences were apparent in rehearsal and beyond. Often, giving notes at the end of a run-through, you would find the two nationalities had arranged themselves silently on opposite sides of the rehearsal room. When socialising, the Irish would drink themselves into passionate arguments at daybreak, usually revolving round what someone had or hadn’t said in Dublin fifteen years earlier. The Brits, on the other hand, preferred to stay serene and drift away on dope. When Sunday evening came and we were left out among the overflowing ditches of the Low Countries with nothing to do until Tuesday, some of the company would drop acid to help pass the time. I do remember thinking, as I spent too many medical Mondays talking actors down from bad trips, that I had not gone into the theatre to become a nurse.

  When in 2013 Snoo died from a heart attack, aged sixty-four, running for a train after tending to his beloved bees in Dungeness, his obituarists were right to play up the fertile anarchy of his comedy. His dramatic voice was his and his alone. But they underplayed the fact that in his private dealings with his colleagues he was an unfailing gentleman. Considering the ferocity of his imagination, Snoo was, like Howard Brenton, as courteous a person as you could hope to meet. How else could we two directors, both with strong views, have worked without acrimony? How else could we have smoothly delivered a living play by Caesarean operation? When, for my own part, I too had to find ways of passing the actors’ empty hours, I continued working on a stubborn and intractable new idea of my own. When I had reached page 25, I absent-mindedly left the manuscript in the theatre overnight. When I came back next morning, it was gone. It had been cleared away as rubbish and already mulched at ten o’clock by the local garbage men. In panic, I started retyping as best I could, from memory. This gave the opening scenes of the new play a flow and potency they had never possessed in the original. From the beginning, I knew I had a great title. Knuckle.

  One night, well into the run of England’s Ireland, Margaret and I took a train from Amsterdam and arrived in Paris in time, we hoped, to see Brigitte Fossey in a dress rehearsal of the French premiere of Slag. It had sets by René Allio, and such was the general classiness that even the poster was by Lila de Nobili. Behind me in the otherwise empty stalls at the Théâtre Michel, as we waited past midnight for the run-through to begin, were two men I recognised as Louis Mal
le and Costa-Gavras. I asked them what on earth they were doing. Oh, they said, they had dropped by because they had heard the play was going to be interesting. I nearly passed out. I had queued at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge to be transported by L’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud and Le Feu follet, by The Sleeping Car Murders and by Z. Significantly, the fact that these two foreign film-makers were waiting to see my play meant more to me than any recognition that might come my way back home.

  We followed our rural Dutch season with two Sunday nights at the Royal Court. The first was attended by some representatives of the IRA, who childishly drew attention to themselves by talking throughout and trying to put their legs over the seats in front of them. Partly as a result of a hellacious review in the Observer by the American critic Robert Brustein, which accused us of lacking the humanity to keep the ideological animal at bay – ‘I find it virtually impossible to exercise the task of dramatic criticism in regard to such a work . . . If the Irish question had never existed, certain English writers would have felt compelled to invent it. They . . . help the bloody butchers at their work’ – the subsequent few weeks of Roundhouse performances filled up with a large public eager to know what the fuss was about. Not many seemed to come out sharing Brustein’s view that our endeavour could be justly compared with that of Goebbels. We could have stayed at the Roundhouse much longer and indeed were asked to. But with Portable’s usual disregard for the main chance, we resolved instead to fulfil a promise to the Glasgow Citizens to do two nights there, because they had been decent enough to ask us in the days when nobody had wanted us. We were all on fire. During these weeks, a political play was put where it belonged, in large public spaces, with all doors open, all comers welcome. England’s Ireland was a seed box. In my own mind, it was a bell which couldn’t be unrung. Sure, its craft fell short. No wonder. It was our first attempt.